Tuesday, September 10, 2013

The Pine Bluff PD: From Merely Dysfnctional to Downright Deadly

No tactical genius is necessary to bring about a bloodless
end to a standoff involving a 107-year-old man armed with a handgun and
surrounded by police officers inside an otherwise vacant house. All that is
necessary is a willingness on the part of the officers to accept a minimal
amount of risk, and a time horizon longer than a half hour. In fact, only someone
with a perverse appetite for gratuitous bloodshed could arrange to end that
confrontation with the violent death of the centenarian suspect.

As it happens, the valiant men of the Pine Bluff, Arkansas
Police Department’s SWAT team were equal to that task. That’s why 107-year-old
Monroe Isadore was killed in a torrent of gunfire on the evening of
September 7.

“It was a lot,” one witness told KHTV
news, referring to the number of shots fired by the SWAT team in the home
where Isadore had holed up. “I can’t even count on my hands.” Another witness
said that at least thirty rounds had been fired during the fatal fusillade.

Isadore reportedly fired a couple of desultory shots at the
SWAT operators who inserted a tear gas grenade into the house, and then a few
more after the entry team flung a flash-bang grenade into the bedroom. Pauline
Lewis, who owns the home where Isadore was killed, told reporters that the
police “didn’t have a choice but to shoot him after they had put teargas in and
everything. He refused and he shot first.”

Pine Bluff SWAT operators at a recent police funeral.

That “choice” was a result of the SWAT team’s preference for
escalation, rather than containment.

SWAT teams attract people with an appetite for
kicking ass, preferably in situations involving minimal risk. Where real
danger exists – as at Columbine, for example – SWAT operators will be
judicious to the point of paralysis, dithering and equivocating until the
shooter has sated his depraved appetite and taken his own life. Charging a
bedroom occupied by a mentally unbalanced 107-year-old armed with a
small-caliber pistol is a task better suited to the skill set and valor of the
typical SWAT team.

Long before its SWAT team brought a needlessly bloody end to
its standoff with Monroe Isadore, the Pine Bluff PD had displayed a propensity
for overkill. For example: In April 2012, Officer
Anthony Brown, who was assigned as a school “resource officer” at Jack
Robey Junior High School, unleashed
a chemical barrage to clear a hallway when students were a bit sluggish in
returning to class after lunch.

A few years ago, a Pine Bluff officer moonlighting as a
security guard at a local big box retail store attacked
and arrested a handicapped shopper named Scott Mouser, then charged him
with “obstructing governmental operations” for being insufficiently submissive
during the assault. The man had forgotten his cane and provoked the officer’s
suspicion by using a shopping cart to assist him while shopping.

In addition to being a danger to the public it supposedly
serves, the Pine Bluff PD in recent years has been at war with itself.

Tolstoy famously said that every unhappy family is unhappy
in its own way. In a similar vein it could be said that every corrupt and
abusive police department – the only variety on offer, as it happens – has its
own distinctive form of institutional dysfunction. Police culture encourages a
pathological sense of entitlement, and in the case of Pine Bluff that tendency
appears to have catalyzed latent ethnic antagonisms.

Apparently, nobody employed by the Pine Bluff PD can be
fired without immediately filing a civil rights lawsuit alleging various forms
of invidious discrimination. Those lawsuits provide a fascinating composite portrait
of an organization that seethes with racial resentments, percolates with petty
political intrigues – and offers no evidence of being populated by the kind of
judicious, disciplined people capable of waiting out a 107-year-old barricaded
suspect.

During her nearly three-year tenure as Pine Bluff Police Chief,
Jones narrates in her lawsuit, “The percentage of white officers decreased from
75% to 52% … which caused animosity and racial resentment amongst some of the
white officers … chiefly amongst them Chris Powell, who served as President of
the Police Officers Benevolent Association (PBA).”

Last year, Powell’s union
approved a no-confidence vote on Jones, which obviously did nothing to endear
him with the chief. Powell also publicly supported the mayoral candidacy of
Hollingsworth, who was “one of two white candidates running for mayor, out of a
field of approximately nine candidates, the rest of whom were
African-American.”

Taking advantage of a crowded field and a divided
“African-American” turnout, Hollingsworth
was elected with a little less than half of the votes that were cast – and
in her first official act as Mayor, she fired Jones. According to the ex-Chief,
this was done in the interest of appeasing “many of the white officers employed
by the Pine Bluff Police Department, and much to the satisfaction of Chris
Powell.”

Powell
was also fired earlier this year after an internal investigation concluded that
he had sexually harassed and intimated a young female police recruit named Keyonna
Penister. Shortly thereafter, Powell – in keeping with local customs – filed a civil
rights lawsuit alleging that
he was the victim of race and sex discrimination. Powell claims that he was the
victim of a racist conspiracy “to violate [his] constitutional rights …
including his right to be free from discrimination based upon his sex of male,
and race of white.”

According to Powell’s version of
events, Miss Penister falsely accused him of sexual harassment as part of a
plot carried out by then-Chief Jones and Assistant Chief Kelvin Sergeant. This
was allegedly done “for the sole purpose of punishing him because of his
support [for] Mayor Hollingsworth and because he was white.”

The harassment complaint “was first investigated by Lt.
Joann Bates[,] a white female who was assigned to the internal investigation
unit and she did not sustain the complaint,” claims Powell. “A second
investigation was conducted by two Deputy Police Chiefs who were
African-American and not assigned to the internal investigation unit as
required by Police Department policy.” Powell insists that “The City of Pine
Bluff systematically excluded whites from the Review Committee” created to
conduct the second investigation of Penister’s charge.

Powell asserts that the decision to fire him was “arbitrary
and capricious… and a motivating factor was [his] race and gender…..” He also
claims to be the victim of disparate treatment, because “Black members of the
Pine Bluff Police Department who have committed sexual harassment have not been
terminated.” Among them, allegedly, are Ivan Whitfield, an assistant Chief of
Police, and Officer Ed Johnson, who “was not terminated” despite supposedly
conducting an affair while on the clock. Powell also claims that a black officer
named Treadwell “threatened other officers and was not fired,” that Officer
Billy Bradley “was arrested and found guilty of DWI, leaving the scene of an
accident, and making a false statement and was only suspended; and that Lt.
James Golden remains on the payroll despite being found “drinking on duty.”

Current Chief Jeff Hubanks.

Pine
Bluff Police Chief John Howell, who was fired by then-Mayor Carl Redus in
Mach 2010, filed his own lawsuit the day after he lost his job. Howell insists
that Redus fired him in a fit of incoherent rage when the Chief expressed
concerns about a proposed gun turn-in program in which police would void
traffic tickets on behalf of citizens who surrendered their firearms. Powell
also claims that Redus improperly intervened in criminal cases, sometimes to
the extent of questioning witnesses before allowing them to talk to the police.

Redus claimed that he fired Howell for insubordination. The
ex-chief described the termination as an act of age and race discrimination –
and said that by choosing Brenda Jones, a 48-year-old black single mother, Redus
validated that claim.

Howell’s suit was
dismissed by a federal judge in December 2010. While Powell and Jones
continue to pursue their lawsuits, the office they once held is occupied by Jeff Hubanks, who was
lured out of retirement by Mayor Hollingsworth.

The Mayor introduced Hubanks “to a cheering crowd of police
officers, many of whom had waited in the parking lot of the civic center for
more than an hour,” reported
the Pine Bluff Commercial. Powell
– who at the time hadn’t yet been shown the door – exulted that by firing Jones
and appointing Hubanks, Mayor Hollingsworth had demonstrated that “the era of
tyranny is over.”

Hubanks was warmly embraced by his troops, but the public
has legitimate cause for concern: Before retiring as a Lieutenant, Hubanks served
as commander of the department’s SWAT team for more than a decade. At least
some of the operators who carried out the execution of 107-year-old Monroe
Isadore were probably selected and trained by him. Once merely dysfunctional,
the Pine Bluff PD has become downright deadly.

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Let's see. A hundred-and-seven year old man.... with a gun.... in an empty home.... what to do?

How about station one ogre near the front door, another near the rear door and a third outside the old man's bedroom window.

Wait an hour or so. Sooner or later snoring will be heard by the bozo outside that window. He could then walk around to the back of the house and collect his fellow Blue Boy and the pair could then walk around and collect the third cop at the other door.

Now, provided the snoring heard wasn't coming from one of the cops on duty, the three could be assured that the old man is asleep. They simply enter, walk to the bedroom, remove the weapon, awaken the old-timer and slowly walk him out to one of their vehicles and take him in (or simply take the weapon and let the old man sleep and pick him up the next day).

By why go to all that trouble when you can fire tear gas and grenades into another human's home and then, after you've destroyed the interior of the home, shoot the hell out of it all in order to murder a man?

Obviously it's a lot more enjoyable to kill the old then actually use your brain, if you are a cop.

And, you have the added benefit of making known to the populace: 'We'll murder ANYONE - old, young, female, sick, feeble-minded; We'll murder ANYONE who gets in our way. That's the way we roll.... '